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BOOK THREE
LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL
TO WILBUR WRIGHT AND WILLIAM MARCONI
"Great Spirit—Thou who in my being's burning mesh
Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the
flesh,
Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust
Hast thrust
Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights,
Where are the deeds that needs must be,
The dreams, the high delights,
That I once more may hear my voice
From cloudy door to door rejoice—
May stretch the boundaries of love
Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears
To the faint-remembered glory of those years—
May lift my soul
And reach this Heaven of thine
With mine?"
"Come up here, dear little Child
To fly in the clouds and winds with me, and play with the
measureless light!"
PART ONE :
WISTFUL MILLIONAIRES
CHAPTER I
MR. CARNEGIE SPEAKS UP
AS I was wandering through space the other day—just
aeroplaning past on my way over from Mars—I came sud-
denly upon a neat, snug little property, with a huge sign
stuck in the middle of it:
THE EARTH: THIS DESIRABLE PROPERTY TO LET.
Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan & Co.
I was just about to pass it by, inferring naturally that it must
be a mere bank, or wholesale house, or something, when it
occurred to me it might do no harm to stop over on it, and
see. I thought I might at least drop in and inquire what
kind of a firm it was that was handling it, and what was their
idea, and what, if anything, they thought their little planet
was for, and what they proposed to do with it.
I found, on meeting Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie
and Mr. Morgan, to my astonishment, that they did not
propose to do anything with it at all. They had merely
got it; that was as far as they had thought the thing out ap-
parently—to get it. They seemed to be depending, so
far as I could judge, in a vague, pained way, on somebody's
happening along who would think perhaps of something that
could be done with it.
Of course, as Mr. Carnegie (who was the talking mem-
ber of the firm) pointed out, if they only owned a part of it, [206]
and could sell one part of it to the other part there would
still be something left that they could do, at least it would
be their line; but merely owning all of it, so, as they did,
was embarrassing. He had tried, Mr. Carnegie told me,
to think of a few things himself, but was discouraged; and
he intimated he was devoting his life just now to pulling him-
self together at the end, and dying a poor man. But that
was not much, he admitted, and it was really not a very great
service on his part to a world, he thought—his merely dying
poor in it.
When I asked him if there was anything else he had been
able to think of to do for the world—
"No," he said, "nothing really; nothing except chucking
down libraries on it—safes for old books."
"And Mr. Morgan?" I said.
"Oh! He is chucking down old china on it, old pictures,
and things."
"And Mr. Rockefeller?"
"Mussing with colleges, some," he said, "just now. But
he doesn't, as a matter of fact, see anything—not of his
own—that can really be done with them, except to make them
more systematized and businesslike, make them over into
sort of Standard Oil Spiritual Refineries, fill them with mil-
lions more of little Rockefellers—and they won't let him
do that. "Of course, as you might see, what they want to
do practically is to take the Rockefeller money and leave
the Rockefeller out. Nobody will really let him do anything.
Everything goes this way when we seriously try to do things.
The fact is, it is a pretty small, helpless business, owning a
world," sighed Mr. Carnegie.
"This is why we are selling out, if anybody happens along.
Anybody, that is, who really sees what this piece of property
is for and how to develop it, can have it," said Mr. Carnegie,
"and have it cheap."
Mr. Carnegie spoke these last words very slowly and wear- [207]
ily, and with his most wistful look; and then, recalling
himself suddenly, and handing me a glass to look at New
York with and see what I thought of it, he asked to be ex-
cused for a moment, and saying, "I have fourteen libraries
to give away before a quarter past twelve," he hurried out
of the room.
CHAPTER II
MR. CARNEGIE TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE READ
I FOUND, as I was studying the general view of New York
as seen from the top through Mr. Carnegie's glass, that there
appeared to be a great many dots—long rows of dots for
the most part—possibly very high buildings, but there was
one building, wide and white and low, and more spread-out
and important-looking than any of the others, which especi-
ally attracted my attention. It looked as if it might be a
kind of monument or mausoleum to somebody. On looking
again I found that it was filled with books, and was the Car-
negie Public Library. There were forty more Libraries for
New York Mr. Carnegie was having put up, I was told, and he
had dotted them—thousands of them—almost everywhere
one could look, apparently, on his own particular part of
the planet.
A few days later, when I began to do things at a closer
range, I took a little trip to New York, and visited the Library;
and I asked the man who seemed to have it in charge, who
there was who was writing books for Mr. Carnegie's Libraries
just now, or if there was any really adequate arrangement
Mr. Carnegie had made for having a few great books writ-
ten for all these fine buildings—all these really noble book-
racks, he had had put up. The man seemed rather taken
aback, and hesitated. Finally, I asked him point blank
to give me the name of the supposed greatest living author
who had written anything for all these miles of Carnegie
Libraries, and he mentioned doubtfully a certain Mr. Rud-
yard Kipling. I at once asked for his books, of course, and sat
down without delay to find out if he was the greatest living [209]
author the planet had, what it was he had to say for it and
about it, and more particularly, of course, what he had to
to say it was for.
I found among his books some beautiful and quite refined
interpretations of tigers and serpents, a really noble inter-
pretation or conception of what the beasts were for—all the
glorious gentlemanly beasts—and of what machines were
for—all the young, fresh, mighty, worshipful engines—
and what soldiers were for. But when I looked at what
he thought men were for, at what the planet was for,
there was practically almost nothing. The nearest I came
to it was a remark, apparently in a magazine interview
which I cannot quote correctly now, but which amounted
to something like this: "We will never have a great world
until we have some one great artist or poet in it, who
sees it as a whole, focuses it, composes it, makes a
picture of it, and gives the men who are in it a vision to
live for."
. . . . . . .
Since then I have been trying to see what Messrs. Rocke-
feller, Carnegie, and Morgan could do to produce and arrange
what seemed to me the one most important, imperative,
and immediate convenience their planet could have, namely,
as Mr. Kipling intimated, some man on it, some great creative
genius, who would gather it all up in his imagination—the
beasts, and the people, and the sciences, and the machines—
in short, the planet as a whole, and say what it was for. It
is from this point of view that I have been drawn into writing
the following pages on the next important improvements—
what one might call the spiritual Unreal-Estate Improve-
ments, for Messrs. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan's
property which will have to be installed. I have been going
over the property more or less carefully in: my own way
since, studying it and noting what had been done by the [210]
owners, and what possibly might be done toward arranging
authors, inventors, seers, artists; or engineers or other
efficient persons who would be able to inquire, to think
out for a world, to express for it, some faint idea of what
it was for.
CHAPTER III
MR. NOBEL TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE WRITE
NOT unnaturally, of course, I turned to see what had al-
ready been done by the more powerful men the planet had
produced, in the way of arranging for the necessary seers
and geniuses to run the world with, and I soon found that by
far the most intelligent and far-seeing attempt that had been
made yet in this direction had been made by an inspired, or
semi-inspired, millionaire in Sweden, named Alfred Nobel,
an idealist, who had made a large but unhappy fortune out
of an explosive to stop war with. His general idea had been
that dynamite would make war so terrible that it would shock
people into not fighting any more, and that gradually people,
not having to spend their time in thinking of ways of killing
one another, would have more time than they had ever had
before to think of other and more important things. It was
the disappointment of his life that his invention, instead of
being used creatively, used to free men from fighting and
make men think of things, had been used largely as an ar-
rangement for making people so afraid of war that they could
not think of anything else. Whichever way he turned he
saw the world in a kind of panic, all the old and gentle-
minded nations with their fair fields, their factories and art gal-
leries, all hard at work piling up explosives around themselves
until they could hardly see over them. As this was the pre-
cise contrary of what he had intended, and he had not man-
aged to do what he had meant to do with making his money,
he thought he would try to see if he could not yet do what
he had meant to do in spending it. He sat down to write
his Will, and in this Will, writing as an inventor and a man [212]
of genius, he tried to express, in the terms of money, his five
great desires for the world. He wished to spend forty thousand
dollars a year, every year forever, after he was dead, on each
of these five great desires. There were five great Inventors that
he wanted, and he wanted the whole world searched through
for them, for each of them, once more every year, to see if
they could be found. Mr. Nobel expressed his desire for these
five Inventors as people often manage to express things in
wills, in such a way that not everybody had been sure what
he meant. There seems to have been comparatively little
trouble, from year to year, in awarding the prizes to some ad-
equate inventor in the domain of Peace, of Physics, of Chem-
istry, and of Medicine; but the Nobel Prize Trustees, in try-
ing to pick out an award each year to some man who could
be regarded as a true inventor in Literature, have met with
considerable difficulty in deciding just what sort of a man
Alfred Nobel had in mind, and had set aside his forty thou-
sand dollars for when he directed that it should go—to
quote from the Will—"To the person who shall have pro-
duced in the field of Literature the most distinguished work
of an idealistic tendency."
Allen Upward, for instance, an Englishman unknown in
Stockholm, invented and published a book four years ago, called
the "New Word," which was so idealistic and distinguished
a book, and so full of new ideas and of new combinations
of old ideas, that there was scarcely a publisher in England
who did not instinctively recognize it, who did not see that
it would not pay at once, and that therefore it was too strange
and original and too important a book for him to publish,
and after a long delay the book was finally printed in Geneva.
A copy was sent to the Nobel Prize Trustees.
One would have thought, looking at it theoretically, that
here was precisely the sort of situation that Alfred Nobel,
who bad been the struggling inventor of a great invention
that would not pay at once himself, would have been look- [213]
ing for. A book so inventive, so far ahead, that publishers
praised it and would not invest in it, one would have
imagined to be the one book of all others for which Alfred
Nobel stood ready and waiting to put down his forty thousand
dollars.
But Mr. Nobel's forty thousand dollars did not go to a
comparatively obscure and uncapitalized inventor who had
written a book to build a world with, or at least a great pre-
liminary design, or sketch, toward a world. The Nobel Prize
Trustees, instead of giving the forty thousand dollars to Allen
Upward, looked carefully about through all the nations until
their eyes fell on a certain Mr. Rudyard Kipling. And when
they saw Mr. Rudyard Kipling, piled high with fame and five
dollars a word, they came over quietly to where he was and
put softly down on him forty thousand dollars more.
I do not know, but it is not inconceivable, that Kipling
himself would rather have had Allen Upward have it.
I am not quarrelling with the Trustees, and am merely
trying to think things out and understand. But it certainly
is a question that cannot but keep recurring to one's mind—
the unfortunate, and perhaps rather unlooked-for, way in
which Mr. Nobel's Will works. And I have been wondering
what there is that might be done, the world being the kind
of world it is, which would enable the Nobel Prize Trustees
to so administer the Will that its practical weight on the side
of Idealism, and especially upon the crisis of idealism in
young authors, would be where Mr. Nobel meant to have it.
One must hasten to admit that Mr. Upward's book is open
to question; that, in fact, it is the main trait of Mr. Upward's
book that it raises a thousand questions; and that it would
be a particularly hard book for most men to give a prize to,
quietly go home, and sleep that night. I must hasten to
admit also that, judging from their own point of view, the
Nobel Prize Trustees have so far done quite well. They
have attained a kind of triumph of doing safe things—things [214]
that they could not be criticised for; and they could well
reply to this present criticism that there was no other course
that they could take. Unless they had a large fund for but-
ting through all nations for obscure geniuses, and for turn-
ing up stones everywhere to look for embryo authors—unless
they had a fund for going about among the great newspapers,
the big magazines, and peeping under them through all the
world for geniuses—and unless they had still another large
fund for guaranteeing their decision when they had found
one, a fund for convincing the world that they were right,
and that they were not wasting their forty thousand dollars
—the Trustees have taken a fairly plausible position. Their
position being that, in default of perfectly fresh, brand-new
great men, and in view of the fact, in a world like this that
geniuses in it are almost invariably, and, as a matter of course,
lost or mislaid until they are dead, much the best and safest
thing that Trustees of Idealism could do was to watch the
drift of public opinion in the different nations, to adopt the
course of noting carefully what the world thought were really
its great men, and then (at a discreet and dignified distance,
of course) tagging the public, and wherever they saw a crowd, a
rather nice crowd, round a man, standing up softly at the last
moment and handing him over his forty thousand dollars. This
has been the history of the Nobel Trustees of Idealism, thus far.
But in away, we are all the trustees of idealism, and the
problem of the Nobel Prize Trustees is more or less the prob-
lem of all of us. We are interested as well as they in try-
ing to find out how to recognize and reward men of genius.
What would we do ourselves if we were Nobel Prize Trustees?
Precisely what was it that Alfred Nobel intended to achieve
for Literature when he made this bequest of forty thousand
dollars a year in his Will, for a work of Literature of an
idealistic tendency?
To take a concrete case, I can only record that it has seemed.
to me that if Alfred Nobel himself could have been on [215]
hand that particular year, and could have read Mr. Upward's
book, he would have given the prize of forty thousand dollars
to Allen Upward. He would not have given the prize to
Mr. Kipling—he would have given it twenty years before;
but in this particular year of which I am writing, when he
saw these two men together, I believe he would have given the
prize to Allen Upward, and he would have hurried.
I would like to put forward at this point two inquiries.
First, why did the Trustees not award the prize to Allen
Upward? And second, what would have happened if they had?
First, the Trustees could not be sure that Mr. Upward
in his work of genius was telling the truth.
Second, they could not be sure that the world would
approve of his having forty thousand dollars for telling the
truth. Perhaps the world would have rather had him paid
forty thousand dollars for not telling it.
Third, Mr. Kipling was safe. No creative work had to
be done on Kipling; all they had to do was to send him the
cheque. Great crowds had swept in from all over the world,
and nominated Mr. Kipling; the Committee merely had to
confirm the nomination.
Fourth, Mr. Upward, like all idealists, like all men who
have the power of throwing this world into the melting-pot
and bringing it out new again partly unrecognizable (which,
of course, is the regular historical, almost conventional, thing
for an idealist to do with a world), bewildered the Nobel
Prize Committee. They could not be sure but that Mr.
Upward's next book would be thought in the wrong, and make
their having given him forty thousand dollars to write it
ridiculous.
. . . . . . .
What would have happened if the Trustees had given the
prize to Mr. Upward?
First, practically no one would have known who he was, [216]
and twenty-five nations would have been reading his book
in a week, to see why the prize was given to him. The book
would have been given the most widespread, highly stim-
ulated, forty-thousand-dollar-power attention that any book
in any age has had.
Only now and then would a man go over and take down his
old Kiplings from the shelf and read them, because he had
heard that Mr. Kipling had forty thousands dollars more
than he had had before.
Secondly, Mr. Upward's new book would have the stimulus
of his knowing while he was writing it that every word would
be read by everybody. All the draught on the fire of his
genius of the whole listening world would result in a work
that even Mr. Upward himself perhaps would hardly believe
he had written. As events turned out, and Mr. Upward
did not get the prize there might be many reasons to believe
that his next book might be out of focus, might be a mere
petulant, scolding book, his exultation spent or dwindled,
because his last tremendous wager—that the world wanted
the truth—was lost.
Scolding in a book means, as a rule, either juvenility or
it means relapse into conscious degeneration of the soul—
the focussing and fusing power in a man. I have sometimes
wondered if even Christ, if He had not died in His thirty-
third year, made His great dare for the world on the cross
early, would not have stopped believing so magnificently
in other people at about forty or forty-five or so, and would
not have spent the rest of His days in railing at them, and
in being very bitter and helpless and eloquent about Rome
and Jerusalem. I have caught myself once or twice being
glad Abraham Lincoln died suddenly just when he did, his
great faith and love all warm in him, and his great oath for
the world—that it was good—still fresh upon his lips!
Writing a book like Allen Upward's for a planet with a
vision of a thousand years singing splendidly through it, [217]
and then just reading it all alone afterward when he has
written it, and going over the score all alone by himself, would
seem to be a good deal of a strain. To be contradicted out
loud and gloriously by a world might be inspiring, but to
be contradicted by a solid phalanx of silent nations, trooping
up behind one another, unanimous, impervious, is enough to
make any radiant, long-accumulated genius pause in full
career, question himself, question his vision as a chimera,
as some faintly lighted Northern Lights upon the world,
that would never mean anything, that was an illusion, that
would just flicker in the great dark once more and go out.
I do not say that this is true, or that it would be true of
Allen Upward.
But I have read his book. I should think it might be true.
What Alfred Nobel had in mind, his whole idea in his Will,
it seems to some of us, was to put in his forty thousand dollars
at the working end of some man's mind, at the end of the
man's mind where the forty thousand dollars would itself be
creative, where the forty thousand dollars would get into the
man, and work out through the man and through his gen-
ius into the world. It does not seem to me that he wanted
to put his forty thousand dollars at the idle, old remember-
ing end of a man's mind; that he meant it should be used as
a mere reward for idealism. I doubt if it even so much as
occurred to Alfred Nobel, who was an idealist himself, that
idealism, after a man had managed to have some in this world,
could be rewarded, or could possibly be paid for, by anyone.
He knew, if ever a man knew, that idealism was its own re-
ward, and that it was priceless, and that any attempt to re-
ward it with money, to pay a man for it after he had had
it, and after it was all over, would make forty thousand dollars
look shabby, or at least pathetic and ridiculous. What he
wanted to do was to build his forty thousand dollars over
into a Man. He wanted to feel that this money that he had
made out of dynamite, out of destruction, would be wrought, [218]
through this man, into exultation, into life. He had pro-
posed that this forty thousand dollars should become po-
etry in this man's book, that it should become light and heat,
a power-house of thought, of great events. What Alfred
Nobel had in mind, I think, with his little forty thousand
dollars, was that it should be given a chance to become an
intimate part of some man's genius; that it should become
perhaps at last a Great Book—that great foundry of men's
souls, where the moulds of History are patterned out, and where
the hopes of nations and the prayers of women and children
and of great men are, and where the ideals of men—those
huge drive-wheels of the world—are cast in a strange light
and silence.
I wondered if they could have thought of this when they
voted on Allen Upward's book that day three years ago—
those twenty grave, quiet gentlemen in frockcoats in Stockholm!
. . . . . . .
I have picked out Mr. Upward's book because it is the
most difficult, the most hazardous, and the least fortunate
one I know, to make my point with; and because a great
many people will get the reaction of disagreeing with me,
and feeling about it probably, the way the Nobel Prizes Trustees
did. I have wanted to take a book which has the traits in
it for which men of genius are persecuted or crucified or ignored
—our more modern timid or anonymous form of the cross.
If Mr. Upward had been given the Prize by the Nobel Prize
Trustees, it will have to be admitted a howl would have gone
up round the world that would not have quieted down yet;
and it is this howl that Mr. Nobel intended his Prize for,
and that he thought a man would need about forty thousand
dollars to meet.
I might have taken anyone of several other books, and
they would have illustrated my point snugly and more con-
veniently; but just that right touch of craziness that Nobel [219]
had in mind, and that goes with great experiment of spirit
—the chill, Nietzsche-like wildness, that bravado before
God and man and before Time, that swinging one's self out
on Eternity, which make Upward a typical man of genius,
would have been lacking. K____ (whose criticisms of books
are the most creative ones I know) said of Upward's book
that he felt very happy and strangely emancipated when
he read it, but that it was an uncanny experience, as if he
had been made of thin air, had become a kind of aerated
being, a psychic effect that genius often has; and K ____
admitted to me confidentially that he felt that possibly he
and Upward were being a little crazy and happy together
by themselves, breaking out into infinite space so, and he
took the book over to W ____, and left it on his desk slink-
ingly and half-ashamed and without saying anything about
it. He said he was enormously relieved next time he saw
W ____, felt as if he had just been pulled out of Bedlam
to find that there was at least one other man in the world
apparently in his right mind, who valued the book as he did.
This is the precise feeling, it seems to me, that the Nobel
Prize was intended to champion and to stand by and tempor-
arily defend in a new author—the feeling he gives us of
being in the presence of unseen forces, of incalculableness.
It was this way Allen Upward has of taking his reader apart
or up into a high place (like the Devil), and dizzying him,
taking away his breath with Truth, that Nobel had in mind.
He wanted to spend eight thousand pounds a year on pro-
viding for the world one more book which would give the
ordinary man the personal feeling of being with a genius,
cold, lonely, cosmic genius, the sense of a chill wind of All
Space Outside blowing through—a book which is a sort
of God's Wilderness, in which ordinary men with their or-
dinary plain senses round them move about dazed a little
and as trees walking—a great, gaunt, naked book.
Alfred Nobel was the inventor of an explosive, a rearranger [220]
of things assumed and things imbedded, and it was this same
expansive, half-terrible, half-sublime power in other men
and other men's books he wanted to endow—the power
to free and mobilize the elements in a world, make it budge
over a little toward a new one. He wanted to spend forty
thousand dollars a year on the man in literature who had
the pent-up power in him to crash the world's mind open
once more every year like a Seed, and send groping up out
of it once more its hidden thought.
I may not be right in anticipating the eventual opinion
of Allen Upward's book; but even if I am wrong, it will have
helped perhaps to call attention to the essential failure of
the Nobel Prize Trustees to side with the darers and experi-
menters in literature, to take a serious part in those great
creative, centrifugal movements in the souls of men in which
new worlds and the sense of new worlds are swept in upon us.
For the Sciences, which are more matter of fact and tangible;
the Nobel Prize is functioning more or less as Mr. Nobel
intended, but certainly in Literature it will have to be classed
as one more of our humdrum regular millionaire arrange-
ments for patting successful people expensively on the back.
It acts twenty years too late, falls into line with our usual
worldly ornamental D. D., LL. D. habit, and has become, so
far as Literature is concerned, a mere colossal, kindly, dod-
dering Old Age Pension from a few gentlemen in Stockholm.
It adds itself as one more futile effort of men of wealth—
or world owners to be creative and lively with money, very
much on the premises with money, after they are dead.
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